NASA has announced that it has finished construction of the first Orion spacecraft. Orion, which is scheduled to take its first test flight aboard a Delta IV rocket on December 4, will be the first spacecraft to have the capability to take humans into deep space beyond the Moon, to land on asteroids, Mars, and who knows what else.

Lockheed Martin, the US government’s largest contractor, says it has made a technological breakthrough in nuclear fusion power. The breakthrough will apparently allow Lockheed to build a 100-megawatt ‘compact fusion reactor’ (CFR) that can fit on the back of a truck within 10 years. If Lockheed really has cracked fusion power generation, then almost every aspect of modern life could be in for a dramatic revolution.

Lockheed Martin has developed a human exoskeleton that can hold 36 pounds all on its own without the need for power. The machine could make workers more than 20 times as productive and reduce on the job injuries.

Two of Europe’s largest companies, Airbus and Safran, are joining forces to fight SpaceX’s attempts to steal away their majority share of the lucrative commercial space launch business. This is one of the first times that one of the larger, entrenched, government-backed aerospace consortia has deigned to raise a quizzical eyebrow in acknowledgement at the presence of SpaceX — but it certainly won’t be the last.

Last week, a 1950s Cold War spy plane — the Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady — caused hundreds of planes across the US to be grounded for an hour, and delaying hundreds more that were already airborne. The U-2, which was just minding its own business at an altitude of 60,000 feet above southern California, triggered a software bug that caused the FAA’s air traffic control system to “overload” and shut down. The backup system also failed, presumably for similar reasons. The beautiful irony is that both the plane and the air traffic control software were created by Lockheed. How did an ancient plane that has been trawling the skies for almost 60 years cause such a catastrophic failure?